user
starbolin
<p><blockquote><i>Authority indeed proceeds from true reason, reason never proceeds from authority. - John Scot Eriugena</i></blockquote></p>
<h3>bio</h3>
<p>First program I ever wrote was on a Monroe programable calculator. Your were l33t if you could shorten your program using undocumented instructions or by accessing the unsupported characters on the print drum. </p>
<p>From there I graduated to 80 column punch cards and Fortran on an IBM 1130. The big iron was across town and you had to wait a day or two for your listing back. Code review was the name of the game the edit/debug cycle was just too long.</p>
<p>One Fortran student was a [Jargon://Cargo Cult] devotee. He would literally borrow your code, taking your old punch cards and inserting them into his deck.
<p>My first personal computer was Elf 1802. It had 256 bytes of memory, a hex keypad, and a little LED you could turn on and off. A steal at $99.95. I hacked my own address readout for debugging.</p>
<p> Paid my way into college writing payroll programs in Basic on an Imsai 8080. We had the 'ultimate': 64k ram and dual 8 in floppies. It sounded like a washing machine when it was compiling. ( Yes, compiled Basic ) but that was music compared to the noise from the ball impact printer. We turned our noses up at the whimpy little machines from an upstart garage company named after a fruit.</p>
<h3>Nodes Noted</h3>
<li>[id://149675]</li>
<li>[id://431511]</li>
<li>[id://216626]</li>
<li>[id://674225]</li>
<li>[Saturn]</li>
<li>[id://427517]</li>
<li>[camel code]</li>
<li>[id://221512]</li>
<h3>Selfaggrandizement</h3>
<li>[id://436973]</li>
<h3>Monitory</h3>
<li>[id://380424]</li>
<h3>Immortal words</h3>
<li>[thezip] "I'd be much more concerned with why your script isn't working, rather than with why the debugger my(sic) be giving a false indication."</li>
<li>[rgiskard]" ... using the definition of avian to mean "birdlike" do you think RFC1149 applies to penguins and other flightless birds (ostrich, etc?)"</li>
<li>[ww] "...which goes to show, if nothing else, that seeing what one expects rather than what exists is a source of many errors."</li>
<li>[Tanktalus] is allowed to make fun of Windows at the same as being helpful ;-) It's left as an excersise for the reader to discern the helpful from the unhelpful :-P</li>
<li>"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think I know,
I'll use regular expressions. Now they have two problems." - Jamie Zawinski</li>
<li>Jamie Zawinski an Perl - its not as bad as sed.</li>
<li>"Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X." - John F. Sowa</li>
2009-10-29 03:40:40
1464
0
674529
262
Poverty Flat, Rancho Buena Ventura, California, USA
America/Los_Angeles
80